'Just Before Dawn' (1981) - Jeff Lieberman.

A disparate group weekend climbers fatefully wend their mobile home up a very precarious trail, waaaay off the beaten track, deep into the woods, hoping to leisurely explore the furthest reaches of this mountainous region, only to discover, to their considerable cost, that the supposedly tranquil isolation wasn't quite so isolated, and would ultimately prove to be anything BUT peaceful!!! Even before they make camp they seem to have aroused one of the more histrionically hateful hillbillies since 'Deliverance', and this Herculean, monosyllabic, malevolently machete-wielding maniac makes his awesome presence felt in an uncommonly sadistic series of superlatively grisly, monstrously masticating, stomach-churningly outlandish confrontations!!!!   

In many ways genre iconoclast Jeff Lieberman's frequently nightmarish slasher, 'Just Before Dawn' arguably remains one of the more influential, style-defining backwoods shockers from the 1980s, its resplendent vistas of arboreal Oregon, coupled with mood maestro Brad Fiedel's haunting score memorably creates an increasingly unsettling sense of dislocation and impending doom! The amiable hikers precarious ascent into this rugged, vastly inhospitable domain in their somewhat foolhardy search for more 'challenging' hiking nastily degenerates into a uniquely oppressive atmosphere of squalling slasher movie madness that has thrillingly stood the test of time. 

Maestro Jeff Lieberman's exhilarating 80s slasher masterpiece remains a joy to behold, the fascinatingly ferocious kills are brutally administered by a feral-minded, hideously inbred-looking, uncommonly malicious, savagely skull-wrecking, outsized freak show, this iconic, mile high murder fest loftily raises the febrile, flesh-flaying intensity, and marrow-mulching tension fright up until Just Before Dawn's deliriously demented, jaw-crackingly cathartic crescendo of truly sickening, mandible-mutilating violence that once seen CANNOT be readily unseen!!!